APRIL 17, 2000:
For someone who's used to being a lightning rod, both as a musical and a
political figure, Olympia's Kathleen Hanna recently found herself in an
unfamiliar position among the multitudes of famous and near-famous in New York
City, just one political protester among many. Hanna has been a regular at the
protests being staged in her adopted home town in response to the killing of
unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo and the subsequent acquittal of the four white
police officers who struck him with 19 of the 41 bullets they fired. "When I
was in the protest," she says, on the phone from her apartment, "there was a
guy who was marching in front of me, who was black and had a hat on. The cops
pulled up next to us on scooters and yelled, 'Get him -- the one in the hat.'
And they proceeded to jump off the scooters and run over and throw him on the
ground and beat him in front of me, and I was trying to do something to get in
the way of how they were trying to brutalize this man."

At an earlier march, she says, her fellow protesters had included 23-year-old
Malcolm Ferguson, a black man who was later shot in the head and killed at
point blank range by an NYPD officer, only a few blocks from the spot where
Diallo was gunned down. Hanna has been wondering about the official version of
the story -- Ferguson, unarmed at the time of his death, was allegedly fleeing
the officer because he was in possession of heroin. "But after being a part of
that kind of violence [at the later protest], to hear that this other guy
[Ferguson] was killed, and that they're saying it's completely unrelated to the
fact that he was in the protest, is really suspicious to me. There's a lot of
scary shit going on here, but also a real feeling of hope, because people are
taking to the streets."

It s a good time to be Kathleen Hanna. In the three years since the demise of
her band Bikini Kill -- who became synonymous with the populist-minded wing of
rock-and-roll feminism known as riot grrrl and were largely responsible for
drawing the lines along which some of the underground's biggest aesthetic and
ideological battles have been fought -- Hanna has kept a relatively low
profile. She adopted the pseudonym/alter ego Julie Ruin for her first solo
album (recorded in 1997 at her apartment in Olympia, a town she helped put on
the map as the epicenter of the international indie-pop underground), on which
she began to experiment with loops, samples, and drum machines. Her attempt to
put together a band to play the Julie Ruin material live blossomed into a
full-blown collaboration with two other underground feminist icons -- 'zine
writer Johanna Fateman and acclaimed Pixelvision filmmaker/video diarist Sadie
Benning. The homonymous album they recorded last year as Le Tigre was a
creative breakthrough if not a commercial one, spanning a musical spectrum from
girl-group garage pop to basement hip-hop, the band singing in sly, edgy
cadences that wouldn't sound out of place on the subway or a playground.

And for Hanna, who brings Le Tigre to the Milky Way in Jamaica Plain this
Friday, the move to New York City has been a blessing: she seems more focused
than ever, more committed and connected to each of her roles: as a practicing
feminist intellectual, as a pop musician, and as an activist. Even before the
current police-brutality furor arose, Rudy Giuliani made it into a Le Tigre
song called "My Metrocard" ("He's such a fuckin' jerk," Hanna jeers on the
tune). The metropolis has proven a worthy adversary. "I'm gonna keep writing
about New York, just because Giuliani is just so fascist and scary. It's really
phenomenal to me. It wasn't like that when I lived in Olympia. When I lived in
Olympia, I did write about local things, like what everyone was talking about
and thinking about and stuff. But here, it's like when things in the government
change in New York, you see it in the streets immediately. It's so different.

She laughs. "Although I always thought, when I lived there, that the things
that happened in Olympia were the most important things. And I'm sure that
people living in, say, Laramie, Wyoming, feel the same way about Laramie. I try
to always remember that and not get too stuck up about living in New York --
you know, there's other places in the world, but it's kinda hard to remember
'cause it's so incredible here."

In conversation, what some of her critics have taken for Hanna's
knee-jerk self-righteousness is nowhere to be found. She has a knack for fiery
rhetoric, but it comes hand in hand with an easy giggle and a casual
self-effacing streak, both of which, though often invisible on the printed
page, keep pretentiousness at arm's length. (There's also her long-adopted
perky California drawl, which she celebrated in a song on the Julie Ruin album
called "V.G.I.," for "Valley Girl Intelligentsia": "My philosophy/Is I'm a
masterpiece/I wear a scrunchie/I'll say it again . . . "
She may be a regular at the Diallo protests, but she's also a regular at
pick-up hoops. Not that these should be thought of as incongruous pursuits.
When I mention that I found Le Tigre to be the most fun of all her
albums, she says, "I thought [Bikini Kill's final album] Reject All
American was a pretty fun record too. I think a lot of stuff that Bikini
Kill did was fun and also funny. I just think sometimes people didn't interpret
it that way, because a lot of the time feminists are stereotyped as being
humorless -- and I guess if you're the butt of the joke, you don't find it very
funny. But I always thought it was really funny."

Hanna can talk at length about the political implications of her work -- its
semi-deliberate electronic lo-fi-ness as a means "to disrupt the idea of the
objective observer"; the radicalness of girls with synthesizers and drum
machines in a culture that, she says, discourages women from embracing and
mastering the tools of technology; and her right as an artist to experiment,
and to fail, in public. "There would be no Le Tigre record without the Julie
Ruin record because that's where I learned all the stuff that I needed to know.
Maybe the Julie Ruin record isn't the greatest thing." (Personally, I thought
it was pretty cool.) "I don't really care. It's interesting. And if Beck can
put out one stupid record after another, I don't see why I can't. I'm not
saying it's a stupid record or a bad record, but it's an experimental record,
and it has tons of things that aren't the greatest on it, it has flaws, it was
recorded in my apartment. I've always said, sometimes the stuff you hate makes
you want to create. If someone's like, 'Ohmigod, I can't believe that girl is
getting away with that. Like, she just has the same sample playing over the
same drum beat, and she's not even playing in time, that's pathetic' -- well,
all the girls who are in their room fucking around with this stuff, who are 20
times better at this than I am, you better put out records. And just show me
up. Kick my ass! Come on! I'm ready! Like, that's what they should
do."

One of Hanna's signature talents is her ability to turn these ideas into
visceral, cheap-thrills rock and roll. There's plenty of this on Le
Tigre: a feminist film critique in three chords and seven words ("What's
your take on Cassavetes? Misogynist? Genius?"); a cross-disciplinary
gynocentric bibliography in the form of a hip-hop shout-out ("Hot Topic"). But
Le Tigre is also an album about the fears and risks and pleasures of
withdrawing ("Eau de Bedroom Dancing") and connecting ("Let's Run"), and at
times one is surprised that Hanna still has to work up the courage of her
convictions.

"There's the part of you that wants to go with what's easy and secure and you
know you'll get tons of praise for," she says, "that wants to write the loud
feminist rock anthems that I sometimes have felt I'm expected to write. And the
thing is, I do want to write feminist anthems, because I love feminism
and it's such a deep part of my life and such an important part of my
scholarship. Because where are the feminist pop artists? I would like to be
one. I would like to be counted among them and find them. But I also just need
to learn things about myself and write in a bunch of different styles and a
bunch of different ways and not stick to one thing no matter what -- to keep
growing intellectually and musically and technically and all those things.
'Let's Run' was written to myself -- to the part of me that's a perfectionist,
that doesn't want to allow myself to fail. And I know that from talking to a
lot of my friends, especially among a lot of women, there's this feeling of,
'If I'm perfect, then no one will hurt me.' Because we live in a culture that's
saturated with violence against women and hatred against women and stuff like
that, and it's like, 'If I stay perfect and do all the right things, maybe
nothing will happen to me.' "

Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of Le Tigre is listening to the trio
chase down a new sound, innovating and improvising a new musical language to
match their playful, unhinged enthusiasm (though all three members are hip-hop
fans, Benning's the one who lends the explosive turntable breaks to the album's
propulsive opener, "Deceptacon," and Fateman is the one with the new-wave
fetish). And that, says Hanna, might be the most revolutionary concept of all.
"Well that is political, especially for three women, to think they have
the fuckin' nerve to, like, experiment musically. That seems really political
to me, because so often, if you're women who have radical progressive politics
and you're out about that, a lot of the time that's the only thing people know
about you. And you're not supposed to -- or be allowed to -- experiment
musically. That makes you impure. You're supposed to just focus on your
politics.

"To me, the music is political -- the quality of the music, and us
caring about the quality of the music, and wanting to pay attention to it, and
being able to do that and not being like, 'Oh we're women, so we have to be
emotional and stuff and not really care about the technical stuff.' Why
shouldn't we learn about technical stuff? I've been kept from technology my
whole life, and I feel like it's a political statement to say, 'I'm taking this
technology now. I'm gonna learn about it and for the rest of my life I'm going
to teach other women that I meet about it, so that if they have a dream like
mine they can follow it.' "